


Up, Down, Left, Right

by paradiamond



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, I unfucked the situation, M/M, Paul POV, Paul did the jump and Lorca didn’t mess it up, Paul tries to follow, Religious Themes, super alive and not in any coma, the decline of religion on Earth means nothing to Hugh, they made it to Starbase 46
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 10:47:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13702899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paradiamond/pseuds/paradiamond
Summary: Like every other Earth child, Paul had enough cross-cultural sensitivity training to know how to act in just about every situation. Smile without teeth, nod, and say ‘that’s so interesting, we don’t do it that way in my culture.’ It’s not hard, he just didn’t even think he would have to do it around another human.Hugh believes in God.





	Up, Down, Left, Right

**Author's Note:**

> Context: Takes place after 1:09. Paul and Lorca had their conversation, and Paul offered to do the jump back to Starbase 46, but did not mention that he was done for good so Lorca had no reason to mess with his code. 
> 
> Note on religion in Star Trek, while Mr. Gene R was hella athiest and believed that religion wouldn't have survived in his ideal future, there are multiple hints that some form of religion still persists, despite TNG's implication that humans are now mostly secular humanists, which makes sense. So the religious context for this fic is that for the most part, religion has died down on Earth, but has not disappeared. Also disclaimer, I am not religious myself, but I find it fascinating. 
> 
> I think Hugh would agree with Jim Kirk on this though, "Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate."

The first thing Paul did when he walked into the room was check to see that Hugh was there, that he was ok. He was. Paul let his shoulders drop, and walked to the bathroom, putting his irrationality to the side for a moment in favor of a glass of water. 

From what he could see in the mirror, Hugh didn’t sit up from his position lying flat on the bed, still in his uniform, but he deserved it after the time they’d had. Paul left him to it, content for now that no one was getting murdered by Klingons or sucked into some kind of time vortex. Unlikely at Starbase 46, but after the time they’d had getting there coupled with his side effects Paul doubted he’d be on the calm side for a while yet. 

“So, I didn’t get a chance to tell you. Before we left, Lorca wanted to give me his battle medal,” Paul called out, rolling his eyes as he re-filled his glass. “I turned it down, obviously. That man is getting more dramatic by the day. He makes me glad we’ll be staying here.” He took a drink and walked back into the room. “On the base, I mean. When we beam down.” 

Hugh huffed a bit and shook his head, his eyes still glued to the ceiling, hands pressed to his sternum. If his eyes hadn't been opened he might have looked dead, staged for a viewing in his medical whites. Paul eyed him carefully before he sat down at the desk, full of nervous energy now that they were finally safe. Nowhere to go, nowhere to put himself except in the hands of Starfleet medical. He picked at his hands to avoid touching the implant. Which would probably be coming out sooner rather than later. Hopefully they’d let Hugh do that part. He made himself stop fidgeting and picked up the Padd. 

“I admit to a moment of doubt, talking to the Captain after all that, looking out at all those stars, but that all went away when I saw you in engineering. So I am…” he said, as he pulled up the program, “Messaging Lorca now, to tell him that I’m done. No more jumps. Good?” Paul asked, without looking up. He pressed send, satisfaction settling into his bones. A future of being poked and prodded, fussed over by doctors on all sides. But he’d have the one doctor that mattered, and hopefully his sanity. 

Uncharacteristically, Hugh didn’t respond. Paul glanced up, then stared, then stood. “Are you ok?”

Hugh didn’t move, still staring up at the ceiling. Rough situations, and Discovery had been one big situation the entire time, had a tendency to hit Hugh hard, but only after, only in the quiet. Paul shouldn’t have forgotten. 

“Hey.” He dropped down beside his husband, lightly, making the effort not to jostle him. “What are we thinking about?” 

Hugh blinked, roused a bit by Paul’s hand on his arm, hopefully pulling him back in like a lifeline. He hummed, which was a start, at least. Paul gave him a little shake. “What?”

Hugh narrowed his eyes. “You’ll laugh.” 

Paul’s heart was in his throat. “I really won’t.”

Hugh’s eyes rolled over to him, some of the life coming back into his expression. Paul suppressed a nervous laugh, not eager to be turned into a liar again so quickly. They still had to deal with that. They had only just gotten back to the base, there had been no time. 

“I’ve been thinking about the end of the world.” 

Paul blinked. “I- ok.” 

It’s not what he expected, but maybe it should have been. Hugh had explained the Rapture to him before, under much lighter circumstances. In Paul’s opinion, it was one of the more radical examples of the religious stories Hugh still, baffingligly, subscribed to, and that was including the one with the whale and the part about the human race coming from only two people and a snake that used to have legs. 

The end of the world, his people’s Ragnarok, as Paul called it once upon a time, was replete with both glaring holes and a weird amount of unnecessary details. Four horsemen, people disappearing of of their clothes, the mark of the beast, it was insanity. Hugh had been entertaining, but sincere, Paul had laughed at all the right moments, and kept his mouth shut. For the most part. 

“I don’t even...know where to start,” he’d said, drawing it out, and Hugh had tackled him. It didn’t seem like the same sort of mood for him now. 

Paul settled in closer. “I would think that we’re a little farther away from the end of the world now, all things considered.” 

One of Hugh’s eyebrows quirked up, just a bit. “Maybe. We’re still at war.”

“Not us,” Paul insisted. “We’re done.” 

Hugh hummed and shifted his weight, starting to stir back into himself. “Would you do me a favor?” 

“Probably,” Paul said.

Hugh laughed, sort of. 

“Ok, what do you need then? Hopefully not a jump, or anything, because-”

Hugh’s hand landed on his arm, a mirror image of how they were already connected. “You babble when you’re nervous.”

“And you get too quiet. What is it?” 

There was a long pause in which Paul did his best not to get swept away in the network, just starting to build back up in the corner of his mind. Since his last great hurrah of jumps, it had only gotten closer, more present under his skin, playing out in front of his eyes. But Hugh was shifting under his grip, and demanded more of his attention. “Would you come? While I…”

Paul bit the inside of his mouth, then let it go. “Pray?”

Hugh nodded. 

“Sure. What do you need me to do?”

Hugh sat up. “Sit.”

“That’s it?”

The corner of Hugh’s mouth twitched. “For you, yeah.”

“Fine.” He jumped up and gestured towards the door, eager to get Hugh up and moving. “Shall we?”

Hugh stood up to send him a dry look. “I know what you’re doing.”

“Well I hope so. I’d hate to think I’d married an idiot.” 

***

The “spiritual” space on the Discovery was one of the blandest places Paul had ever seen. It could not be more obvious that it was a Starfleet required feature, a checked box on a form somewhere, and had to serve any and all religious or spiritual functions on the ship for every race. The walls were a calm cream sort of color, seeming to suck the very life of the air as they watched. Difficult to decorate for. 

Lucky for them, Hugh brought his own decorations. A wooden ‘t’ and a picture of a woman. No, not a ‘t’, Paul remembered. A cross. They used to kill people on them. He watched quietly as Hugh set them at the front of the room and then sat down in one of the plain, foldable chairs he pulled from a slot from the wall. Certain religious required clear space. 

Hugh moved with a purposeful grace Paul had previously associated with him practicing medicine, his calling. Though, he supposed, his devotion likely inspired a similar sort of focus. Paul had never joined him before, and he shifted his weight, awkwardness clinging to his spine. Hugh glanced up, his eye catching on the movement, and nodded at the chair. 

Paul sat as still as possible, legs crossed, hands in his lap. Occasionally, he looked at Hugh, who had his eyes closed. Sometimes his lips moved, but he didn’t make any sound. There was no one else in the room, and the low hum of the engine, the ships systems, even at rest, was evident in the silence. It was sort of like meditation. Very boring, mostly pointless. He had said as much to the Vulcan classmate he’d had when he tried it, which didn’t go over so well. 

He would never say it to Hugh, not now. 

The quiet of the space was loud, and the oppressive absence of sound left room for his other senses to pick up the slack, and for his feelings to take root, creeping up from where he’d shoved them to the side during the crisis. There was guilt for lying. Residual fear. An undercurrent of other overlapping things. And at the heart, always, the network. 

One hundred and thirty three jumps had been too much, and still not enough to see everything there was to see. A different sort of perspective, deep rather than wide. Vast in a very small space, exploring the folded over parts of one piece of place, if it could even be described as such anymore. Paul wasn't sure. 

Hugh breathed deeply, and seemingly at random, though of course that wouldn't be it. Paul cut a glance over to him, startled in spite of himself. Everything was amplified, when he let it be. His side effects. There was fear of getting lost, being swept away, before someone could stop it. There was another layer of fear there too, of being poked and prodded for the rest of his life. A mutant, an augment. Worse, because he did it on purpose. 

Thoughts of awards and recognition were far away now, taken up by the knowledge of the price. He'd be a spectacle, a curiosity. Nothing so crude as an experiment, they were beyond that, but a point of interest and disapproval. 

Hugh breathed again, long and controlled. It was worth it. He lived his work in a way that most scientists can only dream, in a way that Strall never would. There was an echo of grief there, a low hum under his skin like he'd felt after his mother died, but he’d felt Strall in the network, the impression he’d left behind. Connection. 

Then there was the impending loss of it, the end of the road. Paul breathed carefully, and felt a sharp pang in his chest. Not impending, not really, it was already gone from him. No more jumps, no more network. 

The final jump he’d made wasn't the chaotic spiral that the attack on the ship had been. It was familiar, like an old suit, but still just as dynamic as before. The substructures of the universe. Like inventing the microscope and finding the cell. Novel, but so sensible that it almost seemed a foregone conclusion once he knew it. The vast web that held their universe together, an intricate web of connections Paul had first felt walking through field of mycelium on Earth. They responded to him in living color, the connection matched with the function. He got lost in the trees. This was the same feeling, amplified. 

Paul looked at himself from across the room, in the forest. There was no confusion in his face. Beside them, Hugh breathed again, and it shocked Paul back into breathing too, turned his focus outward instead of inward. The spiritual center. Folding chairs. Hugh. 

He knew that for Hugh, the success of his research was just another in a long line of evidence points for his God, for his already established view of the world. Every connection, every link, demonstrated to him the sensibility of a broader plan. Fibonacci sequences. Medical similarities across species. The mycelial network. The deeper the connection, the deeper his faith. Paul was his new prophet, in that way. He smirked, and across the sink from him Hugh rolled his eyes, tilting his head to the side in the way he did when brushing his teeth. They were on Alpha Centauri, and Hugh was explaining to him the spiritual underpinnings of the terrible Kasseelian opera. Hugh collected religions, Paul learned, and saw a piece of his own in all of them. 

Even if Paul had found nothing, nothing at all, it wouldn't have shaken Hugh's faith. What was in the book he brought with him everywhere he went, all versions of it, all different, all antiquated, that mattered, but it didn't. There were rules he followed, and ones he didn't. What was convenient was taken as law, and what didn't make sense was taken as man’s fallibility shining through in the translation of god’s word. To Paul it seemed the stain of humanities previous savage self, a culture long past. So why keep it? Hugh would say true law, the heart of the story, not the words themselves. 

Yet he believed in angels. Irrational. There were no angels, Paul would have seen them. Bordering on ridiculous. But brave. In a way. 

“Alright?”

It was Hugh’s voice. A light in the dark, pulling him back down to earth. Dark? 

Paul opened his eyes, and was shocked, just a bit, to find himself on the ship. “‘Course, are you finished?”

The corner of Hugh’s mouth twitched. He looked back at his icon and made a gesture in front of his body, a fluid sweeping motion with the grace of a thing done so many times it becomes second nature. Muscle memory. Paul watched, still part way gone, on another planet, far away. 

When Hugh stood, Paul stood. He helped gather up the chairs and slot them back into the efficient pockets of space in the walls. 

The hallway is empty, the kind that came with the end of things, rather than the hum of sleep. Most of the ship’s inhabitants had already gone down to the station. There was a silence that Paul could sense, a lack that was compensated for by the two of them, alive in the center of it. Unlike the others, they wouldn’t be back after they left. Paul took in a careful breath, reordering his thoughts, close to Hugh’s heels the entire time, a lifeline to the present. Grounded in reality. 

“How does it go?”

Hugh glanced at him. “What?”

“The thing,” Paul said, lamely. “The cross.” He waved his hand in front of himself in a vague approximation, feeling, and probably looking, like an idiot. 

But it made Hugh crack a smile, which was part of the point. The other part was the serious look, like this all really meant something, like it would help. Paul wished that it would. 

“You really never noticed after all this time? It’s not hard.” Hugh stopped in the middle of the hall, then reached up and touched his forehead. “Up.” 

Paul brought his hand up, copying him. “Ok.” 

Hugh smirked. “Down.” He touched his chest, right where his ribs met. 

Paul dropped his arm and pushed at the spot, feeling the bone. “Down.” 

“Left.” The shoulder. 

Paul touched it, and raised an eyebrow. “Right?” 

Hugh inclined his head. “Right.” 

They moved together, following the line over their bodies, completing the cross. 

Whatever Hugh felt, Paul didn’t feel. But Hugh smiled, and reached over to take his hand from his shoulder, making a far more important shape, in Paul’s opinion. He flexed his fingers, feeling the bones and skin. The life. 

The corner of Hugh’s mouth twitched and he turned, keeping their hands linked as he started walking back down the hall. He seemed better, but there was still an edge of tension to him, like a strained muscle he was trying to hide. It would take time. 

“When we get back to Earth,” Paul said, his eyes fixed front. “You should show me a real church. Not that sorry excuse.”

Hugh was quiet, still partway caught in whatever plane he’d gone to. There were a lot of things to address, a lot of responses he could give. What he decided on was surprising. 

“When? Don’t you mean if?” Hugh asked, cutting a glance in his direction. “We’re still a long way, and there’s a war on.” 

“No.” Paul met his eyes. “When.”

“Well,” Hugh stopped in the middle of the hallway again. “Look who has faith.”

Paul scoffed, and tried to storm down the hall, hampered a bit by the hand holding. But not enough to stop. “Never.”

“Yes.” Hugh tripped after him. “You do, and now I know it!”

“Ugh,” Paul said, like it was a word. “Why do I even like you?”

“You don’t,” Hugh tugged his hand. “You love me.”

Paul let himself be pulled, bringing them back to even with each other. “Oh is that the problem, doctor?”

“I’m afraid so.” Hugh drifted closer. “Incurable.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “That’s-”

Hugh leaned in and kissed him. Paul would have let him even if the ship wasn’t running on a skeleton crew, so he was probably right. 

When Hugh pulled away, he left his hands on Paul’s face, and smiled. “I have found grace in thine eyes.” 

Paul raised an eyebrow at him and drew on his very limited religious knowledge. “Is that from the Book of Paul?”

Hugh grinned. “No. He says...” There was a brief pause. “We rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” 

Paul’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s fun.”

“The Bible isn’t for fun. What else?” Hugh cocked his head to the side, and Paul wanted to kiss him again, “‘For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” 

“That one sounds like me.” 

Hugh laughed, the sound like bells, echoing across time and space in Paul’s mind, a memory and moment combined. “The first was David and Jonathan, from the book of Samuel.” 

“Always so many names.” 

“You have no idea.” 

“What did they do?” 

“Jonathan and David? They ‘became one in spirit.’”

“Sexy.” 

“I always thought so.” 

“Go on,” Paul said squeezing his arm, trying to encourage the playful attitude. But Hugh took him seriously. 

“‘The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as himself.’”

Paul swallowed around a dry throat. “Sounds like that’s your favorite?” He should know, he should have asked this before. 

Hugh hummed, like he did when he was feeling playful, when things were ok. But he shook his head. “Naomi to Ruth. She says, ‘Don't urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.’" 

Paul breathed out, feeling like he’d been punched in the stomach. 

“Well,” he said, ignoring how time was taking on blurred edges and he could see himself out of the corner of his own eye again. It didn’t matter. “Amen.” 

Hugh’s long familiar look, grudging approval mixed with amusement, touched by grace, tinged with love, was enough to make it all worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> paradiamond.tumblr.com for more nonsense~


End file.
